All posts tagged ‘Shopping’

We admit it’s something of a stereotype that geeks are less likely to be watching the Super Bowl this weekend. We’re sure there are plenty of geeks who love football, especially the fans of the respective teams taking part. However, geeks are also smart enough to take advantage of the fact that while the rest of the country is watching the spectacle live, the streets, stores, and other normally-crowded weekend venues will be pretty much empty. So, whether you could give a toss about the old pigskin, or are DVR-ing it to skip through (or to) the commercials, here are some ideas for places to go and things to do while the rest of the country is glued to their screens.

Last-minute shopping for the Hobbit geek on your list? Try The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Chronicles: Art & Design, which includes this spread of Thorin’s Map (Image: Weta Workshop and Harper Design/HarperCollins)

If you’ve run out of steam shopping for the Tolkien nerds on your gift list — and you don’t mind having your gift arrive a tad late and wrapping up an IOU and sticking it under the tree–may we suggest these savvy, Hobbit-themed gifts:

This sumptuously illustrated book, a collaboration between Weta Workshop and Harper Design/HarperCollins, includes peeks into the design of the first of The Hobbit movies, with over 1,000 color and black-and-white conceptual drawings and paintings, plus images from the set designs, sculptures, and photographs.

You’ll see drawings by artists John Howe and Alan Lee, as well as others who worked at the special effects house Weta Workshop. From detailed sketches of Bag End to designs for bearded female dwarves, this is the ultimate insiders guide to the world of art behind The Hobbit.

Or your own “One Ring,” made from gold-plated tungsten carbide (but without Elvish runes engraving) will run you $99.00. If the Tolkien nerd in your family must have “The Contract of Bilbo Baggins,” this “prop replica” can had for $449.00. Or, fans might dig an” exact replica of the scarf worn by Gandalf the Grey.” This “Magical Scarf of Gandalf the Grey” ($99.00) was created by Stansborough, the New Zealand weavers who made the original item for the costume department.

Hobbit Feet Socks

3. Hobbit Feet Socks. $11.99.

Made from cotton, nylon, and elasthane, these smart-looking socks over at ThinkGeek have individual toes and a design on the top that resembles the famous hairy hobbit feet.

Epic Beards from The Hobbit T-shirt

4. Epic Beards from The Hobbit T-shirt. $19.99 – $21.99

Wear all 15 of the beards of The Company at once with this lovely T-shirt. The image shows the mighty facial hair styles of all 13 dwarves, Gandalf and Bilbo (who we all know is actually beardless).

Over at ThinkGeek are a few other cool Hobbit gift ideas, from hairy-footed hobbit slippers to mini plush dolls.

5. The Art of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. $40.00.

Tolkien geeks often complain: How dare Jackson deign to visualize such a rich literary work, when images conjured in the reader’s mind are more powerful than any CGI brain candy? And yet, as The Art of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien proves, Tolkien himself aimed to visualize much of his Middle-earth. A not-too-shabby artist, Tolkien made hundreds of drawings and paintings while writing The Hobbit. Some were planning doodles; some were more polished; and others were intended for publication. More than 100 of these are collected in this lavishly illustrated tome. Painstakingly reproduced here are pencil sketches of Bilbo’s crib, Bag End, Rivendell, Mirkwood, and Smaug, as well as Tolkien’s wonderful maps and runes.

Works in The Art of the Hobbit By J.R.R. Tolkien show the author’s view of Middle-earth. (Image: J.R.R. TOLKIEN COPYRIGHT TRUST)

For those interested in rereading The Hobbit with a more expanded consciousness — no, I don’t mean pipeweed — try Corey Olsen’s Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Olsen directs a center to further Tolkien studies, the Mythgard Institute, and runs a podcast called the “The Tolkien Professor.”His book is a chapter-by-chapter, erudite discussion of the major ideas stitched into this deceptively simple children’s book.

8. The Wisdom of the Shire: A Short Guide to a Long and Happy Life by Noble Smith. $22.99

We already interviewed Noble Smith about his clever hobbit-as-self-help book The Wisdom of the Shire: A Short Guide to a Long and Happy Life. Mixing literary themes and character studies from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and sprinkling in anecdotes from his own experience, Noble delves into Middle-earth to show us how Tolkien can instruct us how to live a better life on Regular-earth. Chapters like “Your Own Personal Gollum” discuss how to defeat those who have a “great hole of want” and “suck the souls right out of our bodies.” Notes help the less hard-core visitor to Middle-earth grasp all of the author’s references.

Quarterly.co is a subscription service that has found some creative thinkers, bloggers and creators of lovely things – and offered them a channel to share what they produce with us. Or, put more simply, for $25 a quarter a clever person sends you something that will hopefully interest, amazed or make you feel good.

The team behind this new venture put it best, when they describe Quarterly.co as a sort of physical manifestation of social media. You get more than just a blog post, more than tweets and links:

Quarterly is a new way to connect with the people you follow and find interesting. We spend so much of our lives connecting with people online that we forget the value of tangible interactions that happen in the real world. Quarterly wants to bridge that gap by allowing anyone to subscribe to influential contributors and receive physical items in the mail from them. It’s like a magazine, but instead of receiving words on a page, our subscribers receive actual items that tell a compelling story crafted by the contributor.

This concept is a winner for me. In fact, I’d love to see this type of service set up for children. I know my geeklets get a real thrill from their magazine subscriptions to Australia’ Double Helix club or the LEGO club. There is something wonderful about tangible, real things you can hold when so much of our world and what we do is virtual. It is why I’ve previosuly written about Supermechanical and their Tableau prototype.

There is certainly a gap there for some one to fill – providing fun, physical geeky activites for children to do with their parents using the Quartly.co model.

Around this time last year (give or take a few months), I was invited to try out the concept of ordering custom-tailored dress shirts through a website. It worked extremely well. I’ve bought 90 percent of my clothes online for the past decade — no lines, no crowds, better selection, decent prices, what’s not to like? Online will now be the default method for ordering my more formal attire too. However, along the way I have learned a valuable lesson in the importance of accurate measurements when buying custom-tailored clothing. Scientists, carpenters and plenty of other trades recognize the importance of proper measurements. I always thought the guys who measured me for a rental tux were putting on a bit of a show, but turns out that that the tape measure needs to be respected. I had the opportunity to try out another well-known online custom clothier — ShirtsMyWay — and discovered that even the snazziest, hand-tailored dress shirt doesn’t add much to your wardrobe if you mess up your measurements.

Cofounders Peter Crawfurd and Michael Yang have been operating ShirtsMyWay.com since its 2009 launch. They offer a wide range of fabrics and designs that, in combination with custom measurements, is claimed to be able to create 7 trillion different men’s dress shirts. I didn’t take the time to test out the 7 trillion claim, but I did try one. Although I favor a tee-shirt as my daily work uniform (one of the bonuses of working from home), I do have an appreciation for classic white dress shirts. While there are many other colors and patterns to choose from (as well as a range of fabrics), I stuck with the classic.

We admit it’s something of a stereotype that geeks are less likely to be watching the Super Bowl this weekend. We’re sure there are plenty of geeks who love football, especially the fans of the respective teams taking part. However, geeks are also smart enough to take advantage of the fact that while the rest of the country is watching the spectacle live, the streets, stores, and other normally-crowded weekend venues will be pretty much empty. So, whether you could give a toss about the old pigskin, or are DVR-ing it to skip through (or to) the commercials, here are some ideas for places to go and things to do while the rest of the country is glued to their screens.

Get some serious shopping done. The malls, Coscto, Sam’s Club, and so forth will be like ghost towns. Go to Target and have the stock person pull every bike down for a test drive in the parking lot.

Do some post-apocalyptic LARPing. Or hold a Zombie Run.

Take your kids to dinner at Olive Garden and keep looking around suspiciously at the empty restaurant and ask the waiter to see their health inspection certificate.

Hit the slopes! Ski resorts (those with snow, at least), will be well-nigh abandoned, and those skiers who are there will be the hard-core, double-diamond types, so the easier hills will be wide-open.

Book an hour long appointment at the Apple Genius Bar and complain about how things were better when Steve was running the company.

Visit your local science museum that’s usually packed on the weekends, and do all the cool stuff you usually can’t get close to.

Have dinner at the posh restaurant where you usually can’t get reservations. Of course, this assumes they don’t have a TV at the bar playing the game.

The Tracktor is ready for the holidays! Use it to check the history of an item's Amazon price.

You’re looking at an item on Amazon, trying to remember how much it was when you saw it in a store two weeks ago. Is Amazon’s price better? Maybe. Unless it’s a toy, in which case, my experience suggests: probably not. But the good news is that there are ways to find out. You probably already price check against other stores — I find Google Product Search the fastest way to go about that. But even when Amazon is the cheapest, is Amazon beating itself? Is a particularly stunning price something you should grab now (as those are sometimes quick to change), or is it likely to stick around for a while? The only way to find out is to check the price history.

There are a few sites that help you do so with varying results. I tried searching in each for a few things that I’ve been keeping an eye on, and on some trackers, not every item shows up in a search. For example, I’ve been looking at Nikon D5100 bodies. I already have plenty of lenses, so I don’t need a kit. Some price trackers, however, only wanted to show me kits with lenses. Here are three of the best options I found overall, for accuracy and features…

[Got more shopping to do on Amazon? Check out Ruth Suehle’s recommendations for price checkers on GeekMom!]

This week’s puzzle asked you to use a simple algorithm to split your holiday gift budget across a prioritized list of friends and family (and enemies who, nonetheless, you have to buy for). Here’s the method:

• First write down your TOTAL holiday gift-buying budget.
• Now list all the people you have to buy gifts for.
• Rank the importance of each of these people: write a number 1-10 with 10 being important in front of each person’s name.
• Now add all these ranks: if you have people ranked 10, 6, 5, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 1, your total would be 39.
• Set up an equation with this total (times a variable) equal to your budget—for me: 39x=$500
• Solve: x=$12.82
• Multiply x back into your priorities list: on someone ranked “10″ you spend 10x or $128.20. On someone ranked 6 you spend 6x or $76.92.

I hate to admit that I actually do this. In fact, when I first put this online, a friend who runs the Cornell Outdoor Education program emailed to say he uses a similar method to split the year’s budget across programs. You could also use something like it to prioritize and split free time across a weekend or, really, anything in which you gotta divide a pool of resources across a number of “things” or “tasks.” (I’d love to hear other uses!)

Many of you used this formula wrapped in an algorithm wrapped in an enigma to split your cash this holiday season, and the winner of the $50 ThinkGeek gift certificate — randomly selected from this week’s entrants — is Lynn, who ranked her bosses and coworkers lower than her cats and plans to use her new-found riches to buy geek cookie cutters. A worthy cause, indeed!

Cheers to all who entered and especially to Lynn who is a winner. While the rest of you, technically, are losers, you can still use the code GEEKDAD33NG to get $10 off a $50 order at ThinkGeek.

Come back Monday for Dave G., who will very likely actually write a puzzle as opposed to writing something he thinks is neat and then pretending it’s a puzzle…

Have you noticed that those sleigh bells ringing and jing ting tingling too sound suspiciously like a cash register? Is this some sort of Pavlovian conspiracy between Toys R Us and the Salvation Army? I hear that noise and I become a Romero zombie lurching into the aisles to spend…spend…spend.

But not this year.

This year, I am adopting the persona of the rational consumer. My budget is my budget and I will not spend a dime more (mostly because I don’t have a dime more…). So I’m falling back on a strategy I outed a year ago on the now defunct Science Channel show Brink.

Here’s how to spread you budget EXACTLY across the people on your shopping list.

• First write down your TOTAL holiday gift-buying budget.
• Now list all the people you have to buy gifts for.
• Rank the importance of each of these people: write a number 1-10 with 10 being important in front of each person’s name.
• Now add all these ranks: if you have people ranked 10, 6, 5, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 1, your total would be 39.
• Set up an equation with this total (times a variable) equal to your budget—for me: 39x=$500
• Solve: x=$12.82
• Multiply x back into your priorities list: on someone ranked “10″ you spend 10x or $128.20. On someone ranked 6 you spend 6x or $76.92.
• Evil laugh, for you have solved the age-old mystery of gift buying.

Above, you can see this method in action above with an unsuspecting shopper — actually a ringer, my friend Christiana. And by the way, if you’re in Southern California this holiday season (though my family and I moved to Colorado) please stop by the shop seen in the video, Serendipity Toys in Ojai, CA, where the owner, Joe, earned a Masters in Engineering at Berkeley in the 60′s. His train track set-ups are simply sublime and his store is that crowded, eclectic jumble you remember from your childhood.

As for this week’s puzzle, show your work as you use this equation (actually more of an algorithm…) to split your gift budget. Then submit the work and your answers to GeekDad Puzzle Central for your chance at this week’s $50.00 ThinkGeek Gift Certificate.

What would Ben Kenobi do to make money on Tatooine? I mean, he was a hermit, but he had to get money to eat somehow, right? And to keep his robes mended and Luke’s light saber in good, working order?

Tomorrow, Saturday, November 19th, a T-shirt is for sale at Ript Apparel that will answer this question. The T-shirt aims to explain what old Ben was up to, when it wasn’t dodging sandpeople. The bad news is that it is for sale for one day only. The good news is that it only costs $10. The shirts come in various regular T-shirt sizes, as well as being available in hoodie form, kid sizes, and even onesies.

I’ve worked from home for going on three years now and that’s meant a very welcome relaxation in my standard 9-5 dress code. Most of the dress shirts and khakis have been relegated to plastic bags buried deep in a closet in the basement, back behind the spare seat I removed from my wife’s minivan about a decade ago. I tend to wear baseball caps instead of ties and the shirt I wore to work today was this —about as far as it gets from my old standby of button down collar and long sleeves.

This is not the shirt I ordered, but playing with the configurator is fun... (Image from Blanklabel.com)

However, there are occasions when even a self-employed geek needs to suck it up and dress appropriately. I was invited to try out a customized dress shirt from Blank Label and figured I may as well give it a shot, especially once I realized just how customized they could be. The process of designing your own shirt is quite easy (and can be entertaining), thanks to an interactive configurator that guides you every step of the way and provides real time updates of what your creation looks like. Designing a shirt takes just a few minutes:

Choose a fabric (from three pages of options). They even have plaid for the grunge revivalists and paisley for vintage-look hipsters.

Choose the shirt style (with the ability to modify everything from collar to pockets and buttons -even add military straps if that floats your boat).

Individualize the shirt with monogramming or a label.

Choose your size.

It’s this last step where Blank Label really takes things up a notch. I’ve always had a hard time getting long sleeved shirts that fit properly —I haven’t had a perfectly fitting dress shirt since I was measured by a tailor for my wedding tux and that’s a long time to put up with sleeves that are a little too short or a collar that’s too tight. Blank Label gives three options: enter exact measurements, fill out a form that lists some key information (weight, height, collar size, etc…) plus fit preference and current preferred brand of dress shirt, or they’ll send you a postage-paid envelope and you can ship them a shirt you currently own that fits perfectly and they’ll duplicate the sizing. I was feeling brazen and went for the exact measurement option and a few weeks latter, I had a perfectly fitting dress shirt for those days when a “Bazinga!” tee-shirt isn’t going to cut it. Although my review version was free, pricing is quite reasonable, especially for a custom tailored shirt: anywhere from $60 to $90, with free shipping.

I appreciated the fact that instead of simply letting you go nuts building a shirt then spitting out a final price, the site gives you the costs for each option as you design your shirt —so no surprises and if you want to stay within a budget, you can make informed choices about where to spend your money.